The bonfire party. The friends in the woods.She’s in a lot of trouble. He hates when I get high.
Layla.
She calls Collins, asks him for a favor. All the guys have been so solicitous to her after they heard about what happened out at the sinkhole, visiting her, dropping off trays of food their mothers orgirlfriends have made. She asks him to get Layla’s address. He texts it to her a moment later and she puts it into her GPS.
The girl might not trust her. And Callie’s not a cop anymore. Just a woman dropping by unannounced asking her to expose the most intimate parts of her story. Layla might still be in Luke’s thrall, smitten and dazzled and made to feel like she’s a part of something bigger than herself, than her own life. But, she knows she hit a nerve with her the last time she saw her, that underneath her bravado is a girl who wants to be understood, wants to be free of the drugs and the men who use her, wants to find her way back to herself again. Callie will do her best to tell her about the case she wants to help build. Because Layla is the strong one, not him. Because they need her. Because she’s got the power to help make things right.
BLAIR
For two weeks she sits in front of a blank piece of paper at the library. Her first attempt, when she can put a pen to the page without her hands shaking, is a little more than a desperate howl.Please don’t take her. We need her. I need her. Please please please. She has a flashback to her first week of preschool, clinging to her mother’s waist, convinced that if she let go, if her mother retreated through the door papered over with cutouts of orange-and-red leaves, she would not see Iris ever again, that she would be left in a world that felt like her classroom, unfamiliar and sterile, without her mother’s presence to help her make sense of it. The world drained of color and meaning, a blur of faces but none of them the one she wanted.
She feels that way, still.
At the trialBlair does not speak about the stones in the woods or the duffel bag in the corner of the closet. She does not mention the way she dug up the box and the evidence she destroyed in the cover of night.
Instead, she talks about her mother’s volunteer work. About the apple slices drizzled with honey she came home to after school. About the meals they made for the senior citizens in the public housing complex two towns over. About the sense of safety she has always felt in her mother’s presence, the bright sweaters her mother wore so Blair could pick her out easily on the soccer field, so that she could always know she was there. Her mother, a flare shot up through the dark.
The paper rattles in her hands as she finishes. The judge thanksher, but she hardly hears him. Blair’s eyes are on Iris. Her mother has aged, over the months of the trial preparation, and over these past few weeks, and from the distance of the witness stand to the defendant’s chair, Blair can see what she’ll look like as an old woman. The purple-hued bags under her eyes. Her cheekbones hard, startling out from her face, her skin splotched and creased.
Her statement might be in vain. The lawyers debated about letting her speak. The prosecution used Iris’s leadership in the Westchester community, her devotion to her children, as proof of all she denied Baby Doe. They even dug up her high school report cards, a testament to her essential sense of responsibility, her conscientiousness. So, what she did all those years ago could only have been done in cold blood. With an utter disregard for life. A paradox unlike any Blair has heard before: that her mother’s goodness, her abilities in school, are an argument that she is evil, that she acted with intent. Meaning, murder, first degree.
As she walks back to her seat Blair feels the gaze of someone in the back of the room. A woman with her gray hair long and loose about her shoulders. For a second she thinks it is a trick of the light, her mind scattered and her eyes seeing what’s not there. Her mother’s worn face transposed onto another woman’s body. But she stares and it doesn’t resolve into meaning. This woman with her mother’s mouth and eyes. She sees Blair looking back and there is something in her expression, intimate—an apology. They watch one another for what feels like a minute, but in reality is only a few seconds, before the woman rises, turns her back, and slips through the doors at the back of the court room. Blair knows that she will never see her again, and while she’ll never be able to know for sure, she thinks she’s just looked into the eyes of her grandmother. Which is what she wanted when she spit into the tube. Family. Connections restored. A story that wasn’t broken into fragments, but part of a whole she could understand.
This is whatadulthood means, she has come to realize. Understanding that there are stories that are easy, moments strung together likebeads on a necklace, fixed in place according to a certain design, and truth; those same beads rattling around in a box, shifting into unresolvable arrangements. Spit in a tube and discover the story of who you are. Write a college admissions essay with a beginning, middle, and an end. Tell a room full of strangers what it was like to be someone’s daughter. Convince a grand jury that because a girl earned straight A’s she must have harbored an intent to kill. We form stories about everything. But how rarely we ever know the truth, even about our own lives.
CALLIE
Collins:You hear? Fauver died of an OD. Found him three days later.
Callie:More ghost story shit.
Collins:Won’t miss that sorry bastard. House stuffed with goodies, cell phone full of texts to his cronies.
Callie:…?
Collins:Active investigation, not at liberty to give details to civilians.
Callie:You suck.
Collins:Charming as ever, Hauser. But let’s just say I think we got our dealer. Thought you’d wanna know.
She feels an instant sense of relief. No one will miss Fauver, and as far as she knows, he was the only one who could connect the other drugs to Jane in any meaningful way. Him and Damien, who, so far, has kept his mouth shut. She’ll tell Jane, next time she goes to stay with her and Opal at their apartment on Long Beach Island. Jane still does physical therapy once a week, her leg still drags a little, always will. But she can keep up with Opal, who she walks to preschool every morning. Sometimes Adrian visits alongside Callie and teaches Opal the names of the kinds of seaweed that wash in on the tide.
You should keep him, Jane says, as they sip takeout coffees and watch from down the beach.
Callie hasn’t told her that they talk about it. A small ceremony by the river. Barbeque and homemade cake. Soon, though, she’ll confess. Once the haunted look dims a little from Jane’s face.
Lorraine comes over on Sundays. Callie hasn’t seen her, tries not to cross her path. Jane says she does it for Opal, that Lorraine still shows up with her trays full of lasagna and ziti and tiramisu and keeps herself busy cleaning and cooking and rarely meets Jane’s eye. Callie wonders if she still wears the charm bracelet. Or if she feels lighter without it.
Annabelle gets offon first-degree charges but is sentenced to involuntary manslaughter. Callie visits her in prison, where she’ll serve one year and do another two years’ probation. The first time she saw her Annabelle had a black eye. The other inmates dispatching their own haphazard ideas of justice, when they discovered what she was in for. Those other women who had to leave their babies outside the barbed wire–ringed walls.
She was quiet and shrunk into herself, but before she left she told Callie that she wanted Jenna’s address, so she might send her a letter.
“Do you think she would mind that? I want to apologize. I want to say I’m sorry about what happened to her. And that I’m sorry I didn’t listen. Maybe everything would have been different if I did.”
Callie tells her about Jenna’s new job, her sobriety, that she’s even recorded a few songs and put them up online. Sorrow-soaked songs tinged with just enough hope to sound just right in her pretty voice, roughened with time and life.
Della’s daughter, Wren,writes a story about Luke, and the rest of the Caputo men, that is published in theNew York Timesunder a headline:The Devil in the Pines. It describes the way Luke preyed on young women, the way Annabelle was punished. There’s a picture ofLuke that runs below the headline, and another of Jenna standing in front of her house, her hands on her hips. She dispatches Callie to buy extra copies at the deli, tapes her own photo to her fridge. When Callie brings Adrian over to meet her it’s the first thing she shows them, followed by her four-month sober chip.
